Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 13, 2010 @08:04AM
from the time-to-measure-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The FCC has published a new 87-page report titled 'Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009 (PDF).' The report explains that 68 percent of connections in the US advertised as 'broadband' can't really be considered as such because they fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirement: 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. In other words, more than two-thirds of broadband Internet connections in the US aren't really broadband; over 90 million people in the US are using a substandard broadband service. To make matters worse, 58 percent of connections don't even reach downstream speeds above 3Mbps. The definition of broadband is constantly changing, and it's becoming clear that the US is having a hard time keeping up."

First-off 99% of Japanese don't have fiber but have a variant of DSL with their overall national average being just ~20 Mbit/s. Second the reason 68% of Americans don't have broadband is because the FCC REDEFINED it. It used to be 256k was called "broadband" and now they redefined it as 4000k so tons of people (including me) suddenly are considered non-broadband even though we purchased Broadband lines (like DSL or cable).

>>>One could argue that labelling 256k "broadband" was a joke to begin with

Not really. At the time of that definition, most people had Narrowband modems of 14k or 28k. So 256k was considered damn fast. In fact it was twice as fast as the fastest tech available (IDSN) for home users.

So the real question is why American broadband was redefined to a low number like 4 Mbit/s? Shouldn't we be reaching higher? Oh wait, we'd see that maybe 1% of our population actually reaches 20 Mbit/s and might actually want to do something about it (like make the telecom companies actually build instead of sitting on fat local monopolies).

My guess is that has to do with internet TV, though netflix recommends 5 mb/s for hd. It only really has to be indistinguishable from a 15-20 MPEG2 stream for the FCC to start making plans to reclaim spectrum from the television broadcasters.

Still, the FCC lowballed their last reccomendation-- at the time 256 kbs was below the requirements for "decent" internet video.

Not even close. VHS is analog and not comparable. Mass-produced DVDs average just 3-4 Mbit/s. And US-HDTV averages just 10 Mbit/s. It's even lower for cable and satellite HD channels - more like 8.

PLUS since all those use old MPEG2 codecs, the bitrate is about twice what it needs to be. The modern MPEG4 codecs used on the web can do the same quality at only half those rates (2 and 5 Mb/s for dvd and hd). While having high

Second the reason 68% of Americans don't have broadband is because the FCC REDEFINED it. It used to be 256k was called "broadband" and now they redefined it as 4000k so tons of people (including me) suddenly are considered non-broadband even though we purchased Broadband lines (like DSL or cable).

I know! My dell circa 1995 was "cutting edge!" Now just a of a decade-and-a-half later, it's been downgraded to "Wait, is that YOUR computer or your grandmother's?" status? It's just not right them changing the standards! Darn government interference!

The FCC redefined it because the way our connections get used has changed. In 1990, there was no youtube, and 256k was a pretty damn decent connection. In 2010, when people want to stream Netflix in HD over the internet, 256k is about as useful as a dial-up modem. Queue it up on Monday so you can watch it on Friday!

It's why I get sick of people trying to say a certain amount of bandwidth "is enough". It's "enough" for the technology we have today. It is NOT "enough" for the technology of tomorrow. If you build it, people will find a way to take advantage of it.

In Japan, it might as well be a MAN. You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society that takes the mandates for the latest and greatest technologies regardless of whether they are practical there or feasible elsewhere. Practical or feasible in the US? Not really, 1mbps is plenty BROADBAND for me. I have something like 15mbps, but that's 15 times excessive for what I need.

Not to justify the Bells for stealing fiber infrastructure upgrade subsidies ten or so y

You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society that takes the mandates for the latest and greatest technologies regardless of whether they are practical there or feasible elsewhere.

Which explains why major US cities and technology centers like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle and other such places have average Internet connection speeds equivalent to Japan's, right?

So... if the only reason that Japan has higher average speeds that the US is because they're densely populated, we should be able to look at similarly densely populated portions of the US and see a similar average. Except, you know, we don't. What's the average broadband speed in the greater New York City area? I'd put lots of money on it being barely better than the national average.

In Grant County Washington population density is 32 per square mile. They have gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable rates through the PUD. A common complaint is that they can tell which servers and regions on the Internet are on slow links by their local performance. We should all have such problems.

California doesn't have 1 Gbit/sec fiber to all homes, but neither does Japan. 99% of the homes are DSL and the overall average speed is just ~5 Mbit/s faster than california's average. (according to speedtest.net)

My parents in rural Wisconsin (pop density 8 per square mile [3 per square km]) have fiber to their home. But they get both their phone and internet from a telephone cooperative. Maybe a cooperative without profit motive has more impetus to keep their client-owners happy.

See what socialism gets you?

Out here in California, I'm paying over $50/mo for 6Mbps (burst) down, 1Mbps up. SBC doesn't seem to be in a hurry to run fiber. Comcast has a lock on the the place because SBC doesn't offer anything above 1M/128k in our neighborhood. Verizon won't come in because we're a working class area. Thank god for profit motive or I'd be surfing the web like my parents.

If population density were really the only issue, then you'd be able to get Japanese-style broadband to the home in every U.S. city that has a population density equal to or greater than that of Japan (337 residents per square kilometer, 873 per square mile). NYC has a population density of 27532 residents per square mile, so average broadband there should be much better than the Japanese national average, no?

and meanwhile here in holland i end up settling for 16 mbit ADSL, because i just moved into a region where due to the regional cable monopolies i have to pay out the nose for 32 mbit (or 16 mbit for twice the price of the same ADSL), whereas at my old adres, i had 80 mbit for less...

Yeah I was talking with some Latvian guys on Skype one time, they showed me some funny Latvian website with a picture of a guy wearing a toilet like a hat, saying "oh yeah this is the hot fashion here" and joking that Korkey Buchek's Bing Bong Bing was the hit song in all the clubs, I was LMFAO'ing XD

Then later they said they were streaming a soccer game, live, in HD, to their computers 8-O

I said "Wow, you have that kind of bandwidth!?"

Now they were genuinely offended. "Of course, you think Latvia is some k

To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.

Also, beyond just having crappy maintinance and ethics a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area. Of course that doesn't excuse Verizon for only giving me 3 Mbps when I paid for 20 and got 20 for the fi

a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area

I agree that it is difficult to supply broadband to the few people living in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have much of an effect on the statistics precisely because there aren't very many of them. The USA is actually slightly more urbanized than South Korea. Stop with the excuses already.

Your country is also around 1 square mile. It's not just population density, but also sheer size. I just looked up the size of Finland and the US - Finland is 3.44% the size of the US and your population is 1.73% of the size of the US. It would be an embarrassment if you COULDN'T fully cover a country that tiny. No, I'm not insulting your country, merely pointing out that you have no understanding of how big and spread out the US is, where you can drive for hundreds of miles at a time and see nothing -

Don't use the size of a country's land mass as an excuse. It it were that bad, there would be no roads / freeways across the USA, and there would be no railroads either..... but the USA has both. Sounds more like an excuse by the phone companies to not invest in the networks and keep those profits for the bosses.

1 square mile, are you fucking kidding me or what? More like 130,596 square miles and the 8th largest country by land mass in the EU with the sparsest population density. It is roughly half the size of the sate of Texas.

What word in "population density" do you not understand? It makes no difference the total size of the land, the metric is population DENSITY. As in, the number of people per sq. mile, kilometer, inch, meter, etc.

And don't tell me I don't know the size of the US, I'm American-born and raised, living abroad, and I've been to at least 40 US states and hundreds of cities and towns, not to mention over 20 countries around the world.

I hate to say it, but if I compare both the broadband and mobile phone markets of the US to Finland (or Sweden, or Japan or South Korea, or...), you guys are still in the dark ages. Why you still accept it is beyond me.

Finland's population has always been concentrated in the southern parts of the country.

It depends not only on density but distance between these population clusters. Even if everybody is clustered together you still need the infrastructure joining these clusters together. So yes, while Finland may have a lower density, your centers of population are also close together.

I went on a hike to Trolltunga [blogspot.com] in Spring and had better phone coverage over the whole trip than I did in NYC. It does seem weird to me that I can sit on a mountaintop in the middle of a huge national park and get great 3G coverage, but in America's most populous city I can't have a five minute phone conversation without getting the call dropped. The usual retort is that Norway has tons of oil and so can afford great infrastructure, but Sweden and Finland manage pretty well on relatively meagre GDPs.

Best argument I heard to why the United States has trouble delivering bandwidth to the same degree as other developed countries is from a friend who works for Akamai.

He states that it is not a matter of money, rather it is when the internet first came to be, we really designed a stupid infrastructure. Other countries implementing the internet after the U.S. were able to learn from our mistakes when their "tubes were being placed". (Hindsight is 20-20 after all) The U.S. problem, however, is that we still

In the 1990's, after the small ISP's had invested their money into purchasing infrastructure and invested their time into fighting with the incumbent carriers to get that infrastructure working the way it was needed for internet access, Congress gave billions (with a 'b') dollars in credits to the cable and large telco providers to upgrade their networks for internet access. Where did that money go? Most likely to fund the consolidation in the telco and cable industries. But one place it didn't go, was to fund upgraded infrastructure.

Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?

His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.

Ah - you'll be happy to know then that we don't actually have a significant percentage of the US population nestled in mountain hollows. And in other good news, it turns out that the existence of Appalachian Mountain Dancers doesn't necessarily preclude the good people of Manhattan from having blazingly fast high speed internet access.

For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.

Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?

In population terms, yes. There's no excuse for urban populations having crap broadband, and there's lots of people in cities and towns in the US. If you're out in the boonies, it's going to impact on your speed (or costs) but that's true all over the world. But more to the point, just look at where the majority of people are, in urban and suburban areas. Is there any reason why it's impossible for such a large fraction of them to get broadband? (Well, yes there is, and it's got to do with lack of real competition between providers. Regulatory fail.)

His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.

Because cables can't go down into mountain hollows... (Or did you think that the rest of the world does broadband always by wireless telecoms?)

To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.

This really annoys me.

Back when we got our first broadband connection (a blazing-fast 768k DSL connection) it was a genuine connection to the Internet. I wasn't doing anything amazing with it... But I would periodically use RDP or VNC or whatever to connect into my home machine for something. I had occasion to fire up an FTP server at home once or twice as well. I even tinkered around with a web server at home briefly. All those ports were readily available for my use. I had to play some games with NAT since I had a couple computers sharing that one public address... And it wasn't a static address, so I had to constantly look up my IP or use a free dynamic DNS service... But I could at least use those ports.

These days I cannot use those ports. I know for a fact that 3389 and 80 are blocked. And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer. Anybody could host information... Share resources... Communicate... It was all kinds of decentralized and whatnot.

These days there's a very clearly defined producer/consumer relationship. It isn't just a matter of bandwidth or anything... I simply cannot host a website on my home connection. I am barred from doing that.

Everything you want to do I do at home on my "not real" internet connection.

You just have to take your Meds for your ADD and use ports that are not blocked, and use a dyndns service.

I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.

I'm really not sure what ADD and medication have to do with anything...

Like I indicated in my post: And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

It isn't just that 3389 is blocked... If I run RDP on 3390 or 3391 or 3392 those ports will be blocked after one or two incoming connections. I've run a web server on alternative ports as well - 8080, and 8088 for example (so that I could remotely manage my router) and they got blocked after a couple conne

Don't you have any provider in the US that doesn't block ports? I only grudingly accept that my ISP in Sweden blocks port 25, but I can understand their reasoning. If they would block 3389, 80, or any other port I would immediately switch providers, that's simply unacceptable.

Here in the US we've got a real problem with local monopolies.

If I lived just about a mile up the street I would have my pick of 3 different broadband providers, two of which are offering fiber to the house. But where I live the only option is Charter.

Well, that isn't strictly true... If I wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars in hardware, cut down a tree or two, and mount another dish to my roof I could get satellite Internet... But that isn't really an improvement. They also filter/block ports.

"Broadband" here in the US is typically limited to one or two choices for your provider in a given area. Limited (or outright lack of) competition provides little motive for our ISPs to actually care about their customers or about keeping up with the rest of the civilized world speed-wise.

This has nothing to do with business class or not. You pay for an internet connection and should be able to use it to the fullest.

My ISP gives me the option in the control panel to let them filter the standard/dangerous ports for my connection if I want them to. But _every_ port and just about any protocol is available for when you need it. Including native IPv6.

Business lines should be about reliability and extra features like trunked lines, not about something as basic as having all ports available.

What do you think would happen if suddenly texts of laws meant what the general public thought they meant (mostly nothing at all) ?

The opinion of an expert is always more valid than the opinion of the public. Obviously. Otherwise, instead of funding science labs, we should just organise polls on which theory is more likely.

The origin of a word, its etymology, tells you what it means, even if you never heard the word before -- particularly if you know some Greek and Latin. And yes, meanings evolve. Being aware of that allows you to read and understand texts of centuries past. But clearly, you think knowing this is a bad thing, and that one should never encourage people to educate themselves. Because only the current meaning is relevant.

Never mind that the current meaning is a marketing ploy.

Never mind that terrible knowledge of their own language is probably the one thing that most keeps people from being effective citizens.

Well, sorry, but it is useful and important to keep telling people what they said does not actually means what they think it does.

... clearly, you think knowing this is a bad thing, and that one should never encourage people to educate themselves. Because only the current meaning is relevant.

When did I EVER say that???

What do you think would happen if suddenly texts of laws meant what the general public thought they meant (mostly nothing at all) ?

OK, now you're just trying to infuriate me, just so I give up and stop arguing. But I'll give it one more shot -- ALL language has a purpose. Purpose defines context. Context determines how a word/sentence/text should be interpreted, which also means context suggests how ideas should be encoded into text to be communicated with maximum efficiency. This means different things in different contexts -- efficiency in academic texts largely means lack of ambiguity, with ease of unders

Yes, yes, language is context-sensitive, I know that. However, what people think their words mean does not mean they do. Just that if the listener is nice he'll go along, and if not, well...

Your argument is that words mean what people think they mean. I believe this is wrong: a conversation/sentence means what is agreed between the writer/speaker and the recipient. And this is completely orthogonal to the actual meaning of the words.

Saying the words mean what to the majority they mean is just wrong. It mean

But I did. Meaning is not context-sensitive. Only interpretation is. Communication requires guessing what the other guy was trying to say. That doesn't mean you can't also tell him what he actually said.

Iterative processes can converge, you know. Otherwise, we would never learn to speak in the first place.

Oh, and the same applies to grammar -- I can say "what did you step on" all I want, and the entire English-speaking population of the world will know what I mean. No grammar Nazi will make me change the way I speak/write if it serves my purposes just fine.

This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
How that a frere ravyshed was to helle
In spirit ones by a visioun;
And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,
To shewen hym the peynes that the were,
In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.
Unto this angel spak the frere tho:
Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace
That noon of hem shal come to

You might be really amused then to know how words have changed over the years. At one time, a plumber was just the guy who made things plumb. It just happened that the most common reason to do so was for indoor water.

An incredibly ugly cabinet with splinters was still "nice" if the angles were exact. Swearing, cursing, and spouting vulgarities were distinctly different.

Is it still television if you're watching an animated movie or a DVD?

People rarely mean remove 1/10th of when they say decimate. Even in aud

What they should call this is High Bandwidth, or High Speed Internet something along those lines. Broadband has nothing to do with speed or performance it implies symbols are used to send bits as opposed to baseband which would just be sending highs and lows to send the bits. Neither is a speed thing, I don't know why have to confuse and conflate technical terms in government and on tech sites were people should really know better.

Actually, I've always presumed it meant a modulated signal - baseband would still be using symbols, not just shifting DC on the wire, in fact variations on FSK I think. Broadband uses a carrier signal and is much more like transimitting a radio signal using the phone line as a wire. I guess I don't understand the technology all that well, but using 'broadband' as a term for data rate is definitely wrong. Even worse is 'narrowband' which just makes me want to cringe.

Think of phone line as roughly the same as speaker wire. Narrowband and is narrow because it is restricted to the narrow part of the frequency range that the phone company cares about for encoding voice data. Broadband transmits a range of frequencies that are outside the narrow range that the phone company uses for voice data that extends from just inside our hearing range to well outside of it.

To make the whole thing more fun there is an ADSL 2+ mode designed for dedicated date lines that uses the enti

I'm torn. On the one hand, I remember when 512 kb/s down and 256 kb/s up was considered to be 'broadband', and seemed pretty damn fast. The idea that a connection can be broadband one day, and not broadband the next, because a bureaucrat somewhere changed a definition seems absurd to me.

On the other hand, coming up with a new name for each bump in speed also seems absurd to me. (I can't wait until super-duper-even-broader-band internet comes to my area!)

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies. It's not. It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves. This is in sharp contrast with other businesses in other parts of the world. The difference isn't the technology or the scale of deployment. It is the mindset of the people making decisions.

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom. The plus side would be we'd get huge investments in infrastructure so the utility gets it's 10% or so return.

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom....

It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.

The only reason rural America can send and receive mail at a reasonable cost (the same cost as everyone else, and the cheapest rates in the world) is that the USPS is a government regulated "utility". The only reason rural America got electrical power and a phone system was also due to government regulation and "interference" via the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) which was abolished in 1994 after completing its job of bringing those service to all Americans.

A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom. The plus side would be we'd get huge investments in infrastructure so the utility gets it's 10% or so return.

Uh..., hell yes? Because in all those places where it''s better than the crap we're served here in the U.S., internet access is, ZOMG!, regulated. The free-market fairy is a myth. Time to grow up and face the reality about how things work in any market where there exists a "natural monopoly".

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies. It's not. It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves.

Don't worry, the invisible hand of the marketplace will exert it's influence opening up more options for us. As soon as a competitor sees the opportunity to.... Oh, wait... Nevermind.

Free market is a wondeful cure for most problems, it just has one weakness: it breaks down once a single company (a colluding cartel counts as one) corners a majority of the market. Thus, you need the government to stay away except for a vital duty of breaking monopolies -- instead of nurturing "too big to fail" crap.

Oh, and in the case at hand, instead of fighting the monopolies, the govt is actually creating them.

No, competition is a wonderful cure for most problems. The free market is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Also, competition is not a protection against fraudulent marketing nor abusive companies. Many companies operate under the policy that are happy to take your money once, then disappear and reappear under another name when complaints and bad reputation crop up. Or they know they're an effective oligarchy, each may have their dissatisfied customers but they only rotate a little. It's also import

You hit the nail on the head. Other than 1-2 cities, there is zero increase in bandwidth in the US, but fees are going up. Essentially most people are paying more for their cable or DSL for the same amount of bits flying across per time period as they did when the services were introduced more than a decade ago.

Take mobile bandwidth for instance. In '06, my mobile phone (although EDGE only) was more than happy to tether. Push a button, and the phone now became a modem. Now, if you want tethering, you p

Comcast, AT&T, all of them do NOT want to upgrade infrastructure to deliver real broadband, because they make far higher profits by letting it simply sit.Plus without Govt regulation or real competition, they can tel the customer, "Stuff it in your pie hole" if you call to complain.

Honestly, they are doing what us as consumers ask them to do. IF you happily pay your bill month after month and do not complain to the FTC and FCC on a regular basis, then you ENJOY your service and LOVE your

California never deregulated the electricity market. They only deregulated the wholesale market for electricity, while maintaining a cap on how much you could charge the enduser, and requiring that the companies that delivered electricity to the enduser not produce any electricity. Those companies that before "deregulation" had both consumer electric divisions and electric generation plants were required to either sell their electric generation capabality or split it off into a separate, unrelated corporate entity. What happened was entirely predictable.

That's fine but you can't regulate the maximum price that the transport company charges while allowing the production companies to charge whatever the market will bear (especially not if you do so at a time when energy prices are rising to record levels). There were other things that California did as part of its "deregulation" that were actually increased regulation. California completely restructured its regulation of the electricity market and called it "deregulation". It didn't actually deregulate its e

Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.

Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.

Why should ISPs use the FCC definition? Wikipedia has this to say [wikipedia.org]:

Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times. Its origin is in radio systems engineering, but became popularized after MediaOne adopted it as part of a marketing campaign in 1996 to sell their high speed data access. The slogan was "This is Broadband. This is the Way". The term has never been formally defined, even though it is used widely and has been the subject of many policy debates, and the FCC "National Broadband Plan [wikipedia.org]".

Of course they are, that's the way the FCC works. Make a definition that everyone can follow then change it and put out a report that says 2/3rds of the vendors are wrong. Standard government regulation encroachment tactic.

I have friends whose speed is 10 times what I have. They all laugh about my speed when we compare and then I tell them that I have this all the time 24/7 and no need to buy extra bandwith because I exceeded some random number in down/up load.Also I have no ports blocked, fixed IP and no P2P throttling. Things they don't have. Price is about the same.

Yet even though they complain all the time about the data limit, none wants to change. They happily buy extra, even though the company advertises that there is

That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.

Either way, without some sort of legal liability, this is going to become standard practice.

I personally only have 3 Mbit internet (256 k up). So I don't have broadband either. But I could get up to 50 Mbit, I just don't want to pay for it. 3 Mbit is fast enough to stream videos, netflix included (if SD is good enough for you). It fulfills all my needs. Sure it would be nice to have 50 mbit, and download a Linux distro in 10 minutes, but it's really hard to justify the cost for the number of times you have to do that in a year. Sure people don't want to be running on dial up speeds, but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet.

It may come as a shock to a lot of Slashdot readers, but a lot of Americans don't have any need for more than that. If the price is right, it's a good bargain. My dad helped an elderly friend switch over to $15/month DSL because she's at that season of life where most of the things that need much more than DSL are just outside the scope of what she wants to learn and do. She really isn't losing anything. In fact, she's gaining Internet access that's pretty good at a price that she can actually afford withou

The internet providers have been slow to give us the 'broadband' speeds that a lot of world is enjoying. On top of that, they are trying to get tiered service, putting caps on how much you can download, etc.

What they are going to do, is bargin with the fcc/gov.

They'll up the speeds/lay the last "mile" of fiber, but to do that, they will need the tiered/limited allowed.

Then they'll rake in the money on all the people who go over their limits because they can actually downloa

I'm happy with my 1.5Mbps cable broadband speed, but let's face it, it's a total price gouging tactic to squeeze more money out of the end-user consumer. If I wanted to even upgrade my cable service from 1.5Mbps to 2.5Mbps, it's an easy US $30/month dent for a measly 1Mbps extra bandwidth and for what? So I can download that , depending on size, handfuls of minutes faster than I could before? Even more so, I'll go on the high mark to say it also has a lot to do with what they know you're going to do with that bandwidth and they make you pay for it (a la against net-neutrality). Almost all wired broadband companies in my area are coupled with television access, so you can buy your internet package separately or as part of a bundled set. Why would they want to give you cheap bandwidth so you can drop their cable television service and use NetFlix/Hulu/Vudu/BD-Live, ect.?

1) Its a monopolized and mostly unregulated unfree market which means that the definition doesn't matter. You can argue the definition of a good hamburger if there are a hundred different local and franchise restaurants, general and specialty food stores, farmers markets, and online shopping to select your burger and/or its ingredients. However, in a prison cell you eat whatever the warden decides to serve or you starve, so arguing the definition of bread as in bread and water is kind of pointless, you gonna eat it or not?

2) The only thing that matters is the end user experience and usage patterns and technology have not changed in AT LEAST half a decade, although the fad website of the month obviously changes each month. Who cares how often they change a definition that has no impact whatsoever on user experience?

Well maybe the users by the cheapest because the ISP are gouging and you don't get a good ROI for your money? I know when I first moved to my area I first went to the "residential" cable followed by the "business" cable and promptly went back to residential. Why? Because after running speed tests as well as real world downloads I found their "business" line did nothing but that cheap "speedburst" trick and that is worthless for anything over 50MB. Other than that I still got between 1Mb and 2Mb.

So please don't say "he/she got what they paid for" because many of us get the choices of a shit sandwich or a shit burrito. My choices are $106 a month cable/TV/VoIP combo (they screw you hard if you don't take the combo and sign a contract, we are talking 1/3 higher price) with a lousy 36GB a month cap, paying another $75 to get my cap raised to 76GB for "business", going with AT&T $62 DSL which maxes out here at 200Kb and is on 50 year old lines which they have made clear they will NOT be upgrading, or $90 a month for WISP with a max speed of 300Kb and a cap of 25GB. Now tell me, where is the choice? Pretty much all of these "choices" are like deciding if you would like to be ass raped by the knobby strap-on or the notched one.

Two points, the first is that a principle of free market economics is that you're not allowed to lie about what you provide. The second is that broadband has a definition related to network communications that has nothing to do with speed (well ok, broadband will almost always be faster than baseband, but that is a result of what broadband is, not part of the definition of broadband).

It has to be said - most UK broadband is ADSL, and there the "asymmetric" is in the name of the protocol. And most people genuinely, honestly, don't need that much upload and if they do, it's a small, rare burst compared to their overall usage (yeah, it would be good to have 8Mb down AND up, but to be honest you're very unlikely to get a constant average measured over 24 hours where upload is anywhere NEAR download). Even back in the days of modems you were lucky to see 14.4 or 28.8 up even on a 56K down